ALL-Hardware's GitHub Actions for firmware remote deploy

CI/CD techniques are coming to the embedded world and recently All-Hardware service together with GitHub Actions enabled a remote access to ARM VHT platform.

GitHub Actions makes it easy to automate all your software workflows, now with world-class CI/CD. Build, test, and deploy your code right from GitHub. Make code reviews, branch management, and issue triaging work the way you want. For more information check this link.

Setting up your workflow

Here you can find demo project for ARM VHT platform with example workflow.

Now let's take a quick look at the workflow configuration file:

name: ALL-HW VHT CI

on:
  # Manually triggered workflow
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      # parameters description
      binary:
        description: 'Binary for the task'
        default: 'bin/TestVHT.axf'
        required: true
      file:
        description: 'Input data for the task'
        default: 'test_data/uart_input.txt'
        required: true
      config:
        description: 'ARM VHT config file'
        default: 'test_data/config.txt'
        required: true
      api_key:
        description: 'API key for the all-hw.com service'
        default: 'XXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX'
        required: true
      timeout:
        description: 'Firmware task timeout'
        default: '10'
        required: true

jobs:
  build_and_run:
    runs-on: ubuntu-20.04
    steps:
    # checking out our repository
    - name: Check out repository
      uses: actions/checkout@v2
      with:
        submodules: recursive

    # using the parameters provided above we call
    # All-Hardware GitHub actions
    # to upload your firmware to the cloud hardware
    - name: Run firmware upload to All-Hardware
      id: task
      uses: all-hw/vht-task@main
      with:
        binary: ./${{ github.event.inputs.binary }}
        uart-in: ./${{ github.event.inputs.file }}
        vht-config: ${{ github.event.inputs.config }}
        api-key: ${{ github.event.inputs.api_key }}
        timeout: ${{ github.event.inputs.timeout }}
      timeout-minutes: 1

    - name: Getting the Status
      run: echo "${{ steps.task.outputs.status }}"

    - name: Getting the UART output
      run: echo "${{ steps.task.outputs.uart-out }}"

    - name: Getting the execution result code
      run: echo "${{ steps.task.outputs.result-code }}"

Firmware requirements

Please note that currently the workflow process rely on the UART IO for data exchange.

The All-Hardware service is waiting for exiting main function of your firmware to finish the workflow.